Wild Wisdom

Why incorporating untamed genetics is vital to the future of our food system

As we watch our world hurtle into a new era of profound changes in planetary cycles, the most important act of adaptation we can perform as a hyper-mobile, hyper-informed, almost android-like human species is to cross-pollinate the domesticated world we have created with the wisdom of the wild.

While our domesticated food system has largely focused on the trivial dreams of an aesthetic-obsessed industrial agriculture—breeding red tomatoes, orange carrots, maximizing the “production” of a few domesticated annual vegetables and grains—the wild has quietly been sinking its roots deeper, surviving drought, extending its network of hyphal alliances, bolstering its resources for the erratic weather patterns to come. While we focused on how much of a single crop we could produce at once—taking species out of their forest structure and putting them in open fields, hybridizing them into infertility, selecting for conditions we have manufactured but cannot sustain—the wild has been investing in species variation and genetic diversification.

As rivers dry up and rainfall becomes variable around the world, the vast permafrost melts, and floods and droughts become the main climatic cycles, the systems we've built begin to crack. Our domesticated agriculture, designed for transport and bred for sale, doesn't seem to stand a chance against the coming Armageddon. It wasn't selected to withstand it.

But there's still time to adapt. There's still time to ally ourselves with life forms that have successfully survived a whole series of catastrophic events and life cycle changes.

What would our world look like if we did this? What would agriculture look like if we began to mix diverse hedgerows and alternate forest allies with our voracious grass descendants? What could we achieve in terms of production, regenerative economies, and ecologies if we considered these species as allies in evolution?